Except for the occasional ranch hand or building contractor, I haven’t officially “hired” anyone in quite a while, yet I still get about a half dozen resumes sent to me every year. It’s another one of life’s mile markers that the children of my college buddies, neighbors, work acquaintances, (and a few here-to-fore unknown cousins), are now approaching their May graduations and looking for someone help them find a job.  It’s not that I mind helping, but I know for a fact that I have a lot fewer contacts and lot less influence than these people give me credit for. Furthermore, I don’t know most of these kids very well, if at all, but I do know their parents and, in many cases, I wouldn’t recommend them for a job.  

No matter how careful you are, no matter how sophisticated or “scientific” the process, hiring is a crap shoot. That’s especially true in I.T. where real skills are hard to assess based on the alphabet soup of projects, tools, and programming languages that appear on the resume of an applicant with previous work experience. Strangely, hiring kids fresh out of college is far less complicated and risky. They have no experience to diagnose, they are generally happier to be at work than the rest of your staff, and they will toil like slaves for slave wages for the first couple of years. It may turn out that they’re completely incompetent, but that’s a risk you run even with experienced candidates.

When considering a “fresh-out” candidate, here are some things to remember:

• Grade point average doesn’t mean much. Any point average over, say, 2.5 is good enough. As a matter of fact, 2.5 to 3.2 might be optimal in that it probably means that this candidate had the good sense to have a little fun before a lifetime of working for bosses like you. Further, there may be an inverse relationship between grade point average and raw creativity.
• Never, never, never hire a candidate who says his/her goal is to be in management.
• Make it a point to do most of your recruiting at small and/or lesser known colleges and universities such as Fort Hays State University, Park University, St. Edwards University, and Canisius College. The most successful candidates we ever hired out of our college recruiting program at PepsiCo came from small, and/or rural colleges like Fort Hays State. These kids had a great work ethic, were delighted to find a job, were delighted to find a job where they could wear a tie instead of rubber boots.
• Don’t hire “fresh-out” kids from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, blah-blah-blah,  …..  you get the idea.  Over the years I had a lot of experience with these graduates and watched a lot of money being wasted on them by my department and others. There’s no doubt that, for the most part, these kids are the crème of the crop, destined for a fast run up the corporate ladder to a corner office and fractional jet ownership, but the problem was (and is) that, for the past four years, their university has been telling them the same thing. Wall Street, government funded research projects, law school, or teaching are probably the best place for these artificially enhanced egos, not slugging it out alongside your I.T. professionals.    

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